ed from
the Palace of the Elysee, had virtually turned his head. He was in the
hands of those military men who opposed revision, and he shielded them
because their downfall would mean his own. He was bent on the hushing-up
course lest his Presidency should become synonymous with a great judicial
crime; he feared that he might be forced to resign even before his term
of office was over, or, at all events, that he might have to abandon all
hope of re-election.

And thus with the President and the more prominent generals opposed to
revision, M. Zola, though confident in the final issue, more than once
said to me that there might be serious trouble before all was over.

He was now kept very well informed of all that took place in France;
intelligence often reached him before it appeared in the newspapers; and
now and again he told me what was brewing. Going backward, too, he
confided to me some curious particulars of the genesis of the Revisionist
campaign. But he will himself some day tell all this in a book of his
own, and I must not anticipate him. I will only say that various
important things he mentioned to me in the autumn of 1898 have since
become well-known, acknowledged facts, and I have every reason to believe
that time will duly show the accuracy of those which have not as yet been
publicly revealed.

There is one point to which I must refer at more length. In his
declaration 'Justice,' published on the expiration of his exile, M. Zola
stated that he had long suspected Colonel Henry, though he had possessed
no actual proof of that officer's guilt. This is so true, that I well
recollect listening to a conversation between him and M. Desmoulin during
the first days of their sojourn in England, when they compared notes with
respect to their impressions of Henry, whom they had particularly noticed
at Versailles on the occasion of M. Zola's sentence by default.

They had then observed how nervous and crestfallen the colonel
looked--the very picture, indeed, of a man who dreads the discovery of
his guilt. This was the more remarkable, as Henry's confident arrogance
at the earlier trial in Paris had been so conspicuous. The man had a
skeleton in his cupboard--to Zola and Desmoulin that was certain.

M. Zola is a good physiognomist, and his friend (as a portraitist) is
scarcely less gifted in that respect, and they felt equally certain of
Henry's culpability. As yet they could not say that it was he who had
actually